The Rise of Cultural History II:

History and Anthropology

Historiography, term 1
 ‘Prison Notebooks’ published into English in early 1970s.

He attempted to break from the economic determinism of tradition Marxist

Thought; a key neo-Marxist

How is ‘concent’ achieved in a class society? (note: Weber was trying to find
answers to this question too!)

Cultural hegemony

term describes how ruling capitalist class – the bourgoisie – use cultural
institutions (such as education) of the superstructure to maintain power in
capitalist societies. The bourgeoisie develops a hegemonic culture using
ideology rather than violence, economic force, or coercion to stay in power.
Via superstructure institution, they propagate their own values and norms so
that they become ‘commen sense’ values or ‘normal’ values and ideas for all
society, including those classes who should struggle against them.

Subaltern

‘Culture,’ for Gramsci, was Janus-faced: both a realm and force of

emancipation and empowerment of working class experiences and a place
Antonio Gramsci, 1891-1937 for the ideological suppression of individual and collective ‘alienation’.
 A bit of the history of anthropology.....

Anthropology: The study of Man since the Enlightennment (Herder is one of the founders; the study of
humans and human behaviour and societies.

Several branches of study:

Social anthropology/cultural anthropology: study the norms and values of societies

Linguistic anthropology: studies how language affects social life

Biological/physical anthropology: studies the biological development of humans

Ethnography: (from Greek ethnos ‘folk, people, nation’ and grapho "I write"):
the accumulatio of necessary data by residence and observation, and the subsequent description of such
societies
Social and cultural anthropologists:

Franz Boas (1858 -1942)

Bronisław Kasper Malinowski (1884-1942), Argonauts of the Western Pacific (1922)

Alfred Reginald Radcliffe-Brown (1881-1955)

Problem for historians until WWII: they focus on ‘writing’! But anthropology is mostly concerned with cultures who do not
possess writing; assumption is: cultures with now ‘writing do not have ‘fixed’ memory and ergo no history!

Growing interest in ‘rituals’ and growing interest among early modern historians:

In France:
Early interests in such anthropological works and method among the 1 st generation of Annales scholars Marc Bloch and Lucien
Febvre

In Britain:
Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic (1971)
Alan Macfarlane, Witchcraft in Tudor and Stuart England: An regional and comparative Study (1970)
Eric Hobsbowm, Primitive Rebels (1959)
E. P. Thompson, The Making of the Working Class (1963;1968)
 Until the 1970s......structural anthropology is very strong....

Claude Levi-Strauss Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908 ---2009)[ structural anthropology

structuralism: is a methodology that implies elements of human culture must be understood

by way of their relationship to a broader, overarching system or structure. It works to uncover the
structures that underlie all the things that humans do, think, perceive, and feel (Note: we
discussed Marxism and Annales school (geography; Braudel)

Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie (3rd generation Annales school), Montaillou

(uses structural anthropology in this famous study of a 13th century village)
 Symbolic Anthropology becomes ‘Big’ in the 1970s in history writing
The Interpretation of Culture (1973) -- Balinese Cock fight

Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropology (1983)

Geertz sought to separate off anthropology from its influences by the

social sciences and to define culture as a ‘semiotic concept’ whose
analysis is not ‘an experimental science in search of law but an
interpretive one in search of meaning.’ (Thick Description, 1973, p. 5).

and

‘.......historically transmitted pattern of meanings embodied in symbols, a

system of inherited conceptions expressed in symbolic forms by means of
which men communicate, perpetuate, and develop their knowledge about
and their attitudes towards life’.

Thick description: a thick description results from a scientific observation

of any particular human behavior that describes not just the behavior, but
its context as well, so that the behavior can be better understood by an
outsider. A thick description typically adds a record of subjective
Clifford Geertz, 1926-2006 explanations and meanings provided by the people engaged in the
behaviors, making the collected data of greater value for studies by other
social scientists.
Nathalie Zemon Davis on her discovery of symbolic anthropology for her study of early
modern French history in the early 1970s:

I could consider the social and cognitive meanings of symbolic and ritual forms
of behavior, which earlier I had accounted for only in terms of groups solidarity…
Now I could look at the non-literature with more discernment…and take more serious
the techniques and endowments of oral culture, such as proverbs and memory
devices. I began to doubt my earlier commitment to a single ‘progressive’ trajectory
towards the future…’
(Davis, 1997, 14).
 The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural
History (1984)

History writing in the ethnographic grain

‘Our own inability to get the joke is an indication of the distance

which separates us from the workers of preindustrial Europe. The
perception of that distance may serve as the starting point of an
investigation, for anthropologists have found that the best points
of entry in an attempt to penetrate an alien culture can be those
where it seems to be most opaque. When you realize that you are
not getting something – a joke, a proverb, a ceremony – that is
particularly meaningful to the natives, you can see where to grasp
a foreign system of meaning in order to unravel it. By getting the
joke of the great cat massacre, it may be possible to “get” a basic
ingredient of artisanal culture under the Old Regime.’

‘When we cannot get a joke, or a ritual, or a poem, we know we

Robert Choate Darnton (1939-), are on to something. By picking at the document where it is most
opaque, we may be able to unravel an alien system of meaning.”’
The role of ‘difference’ and ‘surprise’ is central; like other cultures past societies are a ‘foreign land’

‘…other people are other. They do not think the way we do. And if we want to understand
their way of thinking, we should set out with the idea of capturing otherness. […] nothing is
easier than to slip into the comfortable assumption that Europeans thought and felt two
centuries ago just as we do today – allowing for the wigs and wooden shoes. We constantly
need to be shaken out of a false sense of familiarity with the past, to be administered doses of
culture shock.’